NVIDIA (NVDA) Shares Surge 3% Today: Why One Picture Drove $400 Billion In Stock Gains

NVIDIA (Nasdaq: NVDA) shares closed the day up 2.99% on Wednesday. That’s especially notable because NVIDIA saw 4.98% gains the day before. I would say these levels of gains are unprecedented for a $5 trillion company, but the idea of a $5 trillion company itself is unprecedented. 

NVIDIA surged today despite terrible market breadth. Consumer Staples were down 2.36%, Real Estate was down 2.73%, Financials were down 1.7%, and Healthcare was down 1.01%. 

Even amongst technology stocks, it wasn’t smooth sailing. Software stocks got hammered. In after hours trading tonight, shares of Meta Platforms (Nasdaq: META) are down 7% while shares of Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT) are down 4%. 

And yet, as we noted earlier, NVIDIA gained 2.99% and is now up an astounding 14.7% across the past five days. 

One Picture Is Worth $400 Billion In Gains 

NVIDIA’s gains while the broader market wobbles can be traced back to one picture. We detailed it in an earlier article today, but here it is again:

What you see here is a slide from NVIDIA’s GTC event. Since the moment it appeared behind NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang, the company has added more than $400 billion in value. 

Yet, there has been tremendous amounts of debate on Wall Street about what exactly this picture means. 

NVIDIA shares surged higher after it appeared as many analysts believed the picture meant NVIDIA was forecasting $500 billion in new GPU sales across the next 5 quarters. With current Wall Street forecasts of $61.2 billion next quarter and $279 billion next Fiscal Year (which concludes at the end of January in 2027), a slide detailing $500 billion in ‘visbility’ of Blackwell and Rubin sales would mean Wall Street is underestimating NVIDIA’s coming sales by more than 50%!

NVIDIA Clarifies What This Slide Means 

Given how interpretations of this slide can vary so much, its important to figure out exactly what the $500 billion in sales from the slide means. 

Today, NVIDIA’s CFO met with analysts and discussed what’s baked into that $500 billion figure. Here are a few points of clarification:

• The $500 billion number is cumulative across both Blackwell and Rubin, meaning about 30% of the sales have already happened. 
• The $500 billion number also includes networking. It was unclear yesterday if the numeber included additional networking sales. 

The bottom line: if you were watching NVIDIA shares taking off in the morning, it’s because investors lacked the clarifications I just posted above. Without them, it would appear Wall Street is underestimating NVIDIA’s sales pipeline at an unprecedented level. 

However, after these clarifications made their way through Wall Street, NVIDIA gave back some of its earlier gains. The stock was up 5% in early trading, but closed the day up a little under 3%.

Tonight Could Be Another Catalyst For NVIDIA 

And yet, tonight could create another catalyst for NVIDIA investors. President Trump is meeting with Chinese President Xi at 10 p.m. EST in South Korea. On the agenda: approving sales of Blackwell chips into China. 

If an announcement is made, that could open up a pipeline of incremental sales that could top $50 billion annually. This news would follow earnings tonight where Microsoft, Meta, and Google all raised capital expenditure projections for this year and predicted even stronger spending next year. 

It’s a good time to be an NVIDIA investor. 

The image featured for this article is © Canva